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Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Ind. Law - Report on the current status of the Indiana statutes on the General Assembly website
I am delighted to report that within the last few days the General Assembly has made available online the Session Law Disposition Table I wrote about in my November 2008 Res Gestae article, "Recodifications, legislative histories and tables - Part 1)."
The version of the Table that has now been posted covers "the disposition of each section of every law enacted by the Indiana General Assembly from 1852 through 2001, with the exception of those laws repealed by the blanket repeals contained in IC 1-1-1-2 and IC 1-1-1-2.1." The Table is 1,796 pages long and over 6 MB.
I'll have more to say about the newly posted Table in a later entry dealing with the question of whether all the viable statute law is in the Indiana Code. But for today, I'd like to provide an update on the status of the other issues I have raised over the past years about the General Assembly website as it relates to the Indiana statutes.
Concerns Raised in 2006 Article about the Indiana Code.
Since I wrote, now over two and one-half years ago, my initial article on the Indiana Code, several of the problems I pointed to on the General Assembly website have been addressed. The 2006 Res Gestae article, "The General Assembly's Role in Making Indiana Rules and Statutes Available to the Public," begins its discussion of the Indiana Code and the Acts of Indiana on p. 22 (p. 4 of PDF) by detailing a number of concerns.
You may review the details on pp. 22-23 (pp. 4 to 5) of the article. For our purposes here, I will simply list in bold the 2006 concerns, followed by the current status:
- The current online Indiana Code is accompanied by no explanatory materials. This is still the case today. However, at a meeting of the Code Revision Commission Nov. 20th of this year, a Legislative Services Agency staffer said they were were considering adding such materials.
- Error-ridden? At the time the 2006 article was written, numerous obvious errors such as the one quoted in the article existed. As far as I can tell, these obvious problems have now been remedied. (However, I have heard from LSA staffers that the HTML online version is not as reliable as the PDF version. If this is the case, the HTML version of course should be corrected ASAP.)
- For much of the year, the online Indiana Code is not current. And worse, from a user's point of view, it did not indicate that it was not current. This situation has been addressed. The current online version of the Indiana Code states that it is updated through the 2008 session, and presumably it will continue to so indicate until it is updated with the laws passed in 2009. As most of these changes will take effect on July 1 of 2009, that date would seem to be be the best time to post - and announce - the new version.
- Retention Issues. This is related to the previous issue. Once the 2009 version of the Indiana Code replaces the 2008 version, the former version is nowhere to be found. I have heard of no plans to address this issue. (Why it is important is addressed at p.23 (p. 5) of the article.)
There is one area that I highly praised in the 2006 article and continue to do so today. Here is what I wrote:
The Public Bill system. Something done well be the General Assembly and its staff is the online public bill system, allowing users to access legislation as it goes through the session, along with committee reports, vote sheets, and items.Earlier this year I created my own resource to make research earlier, and I have shared it online.I have nothing but praise for this part of the system. It is good, I think, because it is intensively used during the session by people who know who to talk to if they run into problems.
The materials from each session are retained online and can be readily accessed.
Even here, however, I have a suggestion. Why should it be necessary for the researcher to continually reference tables going back and forth between enrolled act numbers and public law numbers? Why not either facilitate this electronically, or implement a public law number that incorporates the enrolled act number.
Concerns Raised Over the Years about the Availability of the Acts of Indiana.
An ILB "wish list" I first posted on 12/31/03 (reproduced here in 2004) included wishes for:
3. The Debates of the Indiana Constitutional Convention of 1850, the Convention Journal, and related documents made readily available on CD-ROM or DVD, and priced right for the student. Incredibly, these books are out-of-print -- I had to slowly assemble my collection from dealers all over the country.I've included #3 only to give context. All these documents on the Indiana Constitution are now available online! They are both searchable and downloadable. Wonderful! (I believe this was through the cooperative efforts of the Historical Bureau and the Court - please correct me if I'm wrong.) Note also that quantum leaps in the availability of low cost memory make use of an intermediary media such as CD/DVD no longer necessary.4. I've got more CD/DVD wishes - the House and Senate Journals since Indiana became a State; the Acts of Indiana for the same time-span. Scanned [OCRed], so that we can see the printed pages. Electronic finding aids would also be nice, but the important thing right now is to capture all this history and make it available before it totally disintegrates.
But as for #4 on the wishlist, only a little progress. This July 13th I wrote in the ILB, complaining that although the General Assembly had just posted the Acts of 2008, it had at the same time removed the link for the Acts of 2007. I continued:
This despite the urging of myself and many others that the files for ALL the volumes of the Acts of Indiana be made available to the public. (I've been urging this for five years; obviously to no effect.)Shortly thereafter, as I note here on July 23rd, back years of the Acts of Indiana began appearing. As of today they go back to 2000. This is good, so far.
How to go back to 1816? Five years ago this looked impossible. That was before Google began its march across the country, scanning all the volumes in major university library collections. Now a number of copies of various years of the Acts of Indiana may be found online, with imprints such as the Stanford Law Library.
For instance, here are the Indiana Acts of 1865. Hopefully, someone from the State Historical Bureau or Supreme Court will be able to coordinate with Google to assemble a complete collection of these invaluable volumes.
So this report concludes - There has been much progress over the past few years, and kudos to all those involved. But much yet remains to be accomplished to make Indiana's statute laws available to the citizens of Indiana.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 3, 2008 04:40 PM
Posted to Indiana Law